Conventional communication apparatuses such as telephones and facsimile apparatuses can transmit and receive speech data and facsimile image data via public networks. Many such communication apparatuses include a convenient telephone directory which stores the names of a plurality of communication partners together with telephone number data into a memory, in order to facilitate placing a call at the start of transmission.
In addition, some recent communication apparatuses have a function of transmitting and receiving e-mail (e.g., text data, image data, and sound data). These apparatuses can exchange data with a PC and an information terminal such as a portable telephone having an e-mail function via the Internet. Telephone directories of such communication apparatuses can store the e-mail addresses and home page URLs of communication partners, in addition to the names and telephone numbers of these communication partners.
As the functions of these conventional communication apparatuses are complicated, however, the items of data stored in telephone directories are extended to the names, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, home page URLs, and the like of communication partners, and the information amount is also increasing.
Before using the telephone directory function of a communication apparatus, the user must register telephone directory data. The larger the data amount to be registered in the telephone directory, the more complicated the registering operation. Especially when a user has purchased a new communication apparatus or has erased all telephone directory data, he or she must reregister all data, and this imposes a large load on the user.
As a means for solving this problem, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-134311 disclosed the following technique. That is, a telephone directory data file having a specific format is formed by a personal computer, and e-mail having this data file attached is transmitted to a communication terminal. A portable telephone as the communication terminal on the receiving side determines, from the contents of the header of the e-mail such as Subject of the e-mail, that the file attached to the e-mail is telephone directory data, and uses this telephone directory data as a telephone directory. In this prior art, however, to allow a portable telephone on the receiving side to directly use the attached file as a telephone directory, telephone directory data to be registered must be formed in a specific format matching the structure of the telephone directory data of the portable telephone. This results in low versatility.
Also, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 10-155038 disclosed an information communication terminal such as a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) by which a telephone number in e-mail is extracted and registered in a telephone directory. However, this method extracts a telephone number by searching e-mail for numerals and character information such as “*” and “#” used in telephone numbers. Therefore, the method is unsuited to extracting diverse data used in items other than telephone numbers, or registering telephone directory data of all communication partners at the same time.